Motor powered toothbrushes have been known for many years. While such brushes can certainly provide more brushing movements over a given period of time, and therefore at least arguably “better brushing”, the earliest electric toothbrushes were deficient in that they merely reciprocated in an up and down fashion.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,183,538 disclosed a significant improvement in toothbrush technology through the use of vibration instead of reciprocation. Among other things, vibration provided superior cleaning because the bristles of the toothbrush moved in all directions.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,466,689 took the concept of cleaning using vibration one step further by teaching a “sonic” dental cleaning device. In devices according to the '689 patent, the vibration was produced by an eccentric weight revolving about an axis at a frequency of 90–100 cycles per second. That frequency was apparently high enough to cause a sensation known as “acoustic streaming”, i.e., localized high velocity streams of fluid created by high frequency sound in a liquid.
One problem with the '689 devices is that they failed to adequately clean the interproximal surfaces of the teeth. That problem was addressed in reissued U.S. Pat. No. Re.35,712, in which a vibrating toothbrush is combined with dental floss to clean interproximal surfaces of teeth. As it turned out, the idea was good but the execution was poor. The '712 patent taught the use of sonic frequencies between 2,000 and 20,000 cycles per minute, which were produced by an eccentrically mounted disc are in the handle. That arrangement imparted a significant amount of vibration to the hand of the user. An arrangement that imparts a significant amount of vibration to the hand of the user is inefficient, because the user's hand dampens the vibration causing less vibratory energy to be imparted to the dental floss. Such an arrangement is also uncomfortable because the user's hand is vibrating significantly.
Another problem is that devices according to the '712 patent had no supply of floss for restringing between the tines. In retrospect, that failure was entirely predictable from the way in which toothbrushes and dental floss evolved. The dental floss attachment was merely an “add-on” to a handle designed to vibrate a toothbrush. Since the toothbrush attachment was quite small, it was natural to provide a dental floss attachment that was also quite small, and therefore had no provision to store a supply of floss. In addition, since it was contemplated that a user would replace the toothbrush and flossing attachments during each use, it was natural to assume that the user would not object to utilizing an entirely new flossing attachment at each cleaning session.
U.S. Publication No. US 2002/0106607 does provide a vibrating flosser that has on-board supply of replacement floss. In that publication the inventor contemplated the supply as an externally mounted reel of floss, which is of course consistent with the prevailing notion of minimizing the size of the flossing attachment, and using the handle to enclose a relatively large motor and battery. But an external supply of floss has its own problems. Among other things an external supply of floss is aesthetically unappealing, and can readily accumulate toothpaste and other fluids. Thus, there is still a need to provide a vibrating flosser that has an internal supply of replacement floss.